Friday, December 5, 2008

Fallen trees

Among the thousands of gravemarkers at Forest Hills there are many pieces of rough and uncut stone. But the Hamilton family monument is unique, at least so far as my runs have revealed. It's made of a section of fossilized wood--a petrified log.

The mid-morning light wasn't ideal, and my photographs don't catch the rich reds, sienna browns, and milky colors of the mineralized log. But the cavities of lost limbs and striations of the grain are visible on close inspection, with living lichen in greens and yellows dotting the long-dead wood.

Petrified wood can be quite ancient. The trees of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona date from the late Triassic--dinosaurs would have brushed among their branches. I don't know where the Hamilton family's log came from; petrified wood is found throughout the world, wherever trees have flourished from remote antiquity to the present.

The pedestal only gives the name Hamilton in raised capitals. On the ground in front, spread out like schoolchildren in a row, are small rectangles of polished red stone cut with given names.

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Why run with the dead?

For the last couple of years I've been running in my neighborhood cemetery, Forest Hills —a genteel necropolis of rolling hills, puddingstone outcrops, and the watchful trees. People walk their dogs and even picnic here, surrounded by the graves of the lonely and the well-loved, the celebrated and the forgotten. But it remains a cemetery, and often on my runs there's no one to witness but the stones and the roosting crows.

As I churn up the hills and through the trees I wonder about the names on the stones, and the ones left behind to remember them. I don't feel the presence of the dead here; I wouldn't be troubled to spend the night if the gates were locked behind me (although there are secret ways out of the graveyard for those who know them). But I do know the presence of the mourners. I've been a mourner here myself, and so have ones I love. So it's no abstract sense of loss I feel as I pad along the paths. I try to run reverently (really I do!), and give the funerals a wide berth. It's memory, not death, that teems here.